Ron's Reality Rants

For America, the Future is Now

Wealth can mean many things. But most ordinarily the phrase is used to connote capital, whether in the form of real property, stocks, bonds, salable art or cash. The question for a nation is “How can we create wealth for our people?” For Adam Smith’s England, the answer was manufacturing. England imported raw materials, manufactured finished goods, then exported and sold the finished product.

The nineteenth century saw much innovation. Little education, even by the standards of the time, was then needed to devise the purely mechanical machines of the still-industrializing world. The steam engine, the cotton gin, the light bulb and the internal combustion engine all were creations of tinkerers, not engineers. Even the telephone and vulcanized rubber were creations requiring much less knowledge than the post WW II era has required. For the 25 years after war’s end, America was supplier to the world. The war had destroyed both the manufacturing capability and the infrastructure in Europe and Japan. China and India had not yet acquired either, so were not competitive with the U.S.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, the now-industrializing nations like India and China dominate manufacturing. The US and Europe must either move forward or revert to 3^rd world, agribusiness existences. Unlike the 19^th century, the 21^st century requires very high levels of knowledge to create new wealth. The high-paying technical jobs for Americans in the 1980s and 1990s included software engineering. Most of the software engineering jobs of the 1990s have gone abroad, mostly moved to India.

America still boasts the best graduate schools in the world, but now India is producing most of the best electrical engineers in the world. And the population of our grad schools is more than half non-Americans.

America, if it is to stay wealthy, if it is to maintain a wealthy middle class of substantial size, will need to produce both the highest percentage of well-educated workers in the world, and the best educational and research facilities in the world. Lest there be misunderstanding, that means science and math must reign supreme. The marginalia to that is music, especially baroque music, facilitates math ability, although no one yet understands why. So let us not do away with our symphonies and string quartets. Professional sports add nothing, but music and likely art are proving to be necessary handmaidens to mathematical and scientific genius.

If your personal assets do not add up to $100 million, then you had best beware. The evil empire is not in a foreign land. Rather, it is a pair of unlikely bedfellows produced in the usual way: political expediency. Nearly half of America’s wealth is in the hands of one-half of one percent (yes, that’s 0.5%) of the populace. If single family residences are excluded, nearly 98% of the wealth is controlled by large corporate interests. These few have persuaded the swing voters, the adherents of fundamentalist religions, that the two groups have major interests in common. Between them, they control the levers of government. The corporate interests seek freedom from taxes and freedom from governmental controls. The religious right seek to impose their view of the world upon the world. This strange coalition has persuaded the voters to disinvest in public education. Were the public attentive to its own best interest, it would disavow the nonsense promulgated by the ultra-rich: reducing taxes on the rich does NOT improve the wages of the un-rich, nor does it produce more jobs. Only the historically unaware (most of the public) can be persuaded that it does. Better is to increase the taxes on the wealthiest 2% and corporations, using most of this money to fund year around public education through college, graduate school and post-doc research.

The “No Child Left Behind” act has been a smokescreen to enable the evisceration of the already weak educational system. Anti-scientific nonsense such as “Intelligent Design” must be removed from all curricula. No longer can we tolerate religious schools in lieu of a rigorous education which includes science, math, history, music and foreign languages (including English). P.E is important, but drama, auto-shop, interscholastic sports and other such time-wasters should go. Exemptions from a rigorous public education must be ended, even for the ultra-privileged religious castes such as the Amish, the Mennonites and the Catholics, as well as for ultra-privileged, super-wealthy parents. Neither can we continue to pretend that we are an agricultural nation whose children are needed to bring in the crops. We must have our children in school 230 days each year, else they cannot learn all that they will need to make their contribution and garner their share of the good life.

For America and Americans, the future is now. We can reign in domination by the corporate empires, insisting that they pay for education rather than for political dominance (the US Supreme Court made them political “citizens” even though the founders explicitly left them out of the list of citizens). We can realize that an education that was plenty good for our parents and passable for ourselves is not even marginal for our children. Then we can make changes, both in our systems and in our own attitudes. The business of America needs to be education and research. A nation that repeats the 1920s assertion that “The business of America is business” will end up stuck in the 1930s.

Foreign policy is an extension of the politics of a nation. That, of course, explains why the US has had so much difficulty generating a cohesive, long term strategy for interacting with the rest of the world: every four to eight years, our internal politics change. One arm of foreign policy is the diplomatic corps; a second is the military. These were recognized as instruments of foreign two thousand years ago, although the diplomatic corps has become considerably more formalized and sophisticated over the years. The third arm of foreign policy, one whose significance was realized only after WWII, is trade and economics. In the 1970s and 80s, the Japanese and Germans had most of us in America remarking that it was possible to conquer the world without firing a shot. China now seems poised to do just that.

But why do the French hate, or profess to hate, American culture? Why is China westernizing? And what attracts Eastern European countries to the west? The success of our business culture, our entrepreneurial class is the envy of the world. McDonald’s is a cultural icon that everyone loves to hate. The food leaves a lot to be desired, as the French point out endlessly, and the “too busy to cook or even eat decently” life style is not goal of many people anywhere. But we sure have a lot of “stuff.” The issue for other cultures is whether the American spirit of success can be imported/exported without taking the American culture, or lack of culture, along with it.

The power of America’s military-industrial complex was never more evident than when the Soviet Union collapsed without a shot being fired. The Soviets had been vastly more successful in the diplomatic arena than had America, and the Soviet army was on par with the US army. They were the two best armies in the world. The Soviet system had also produced educational excellence. What it could not produce was an effective industrial base. Productivity was low, quality was low and indifference was high. Eventually, American ability to produce the profits to tax and plow back into an ever-advancing military was more pressure than the Soviet economy could bear. It collapsed.

The Chinese government, long no friend of any outside of China, has been co-opted by the “stuff” from the West. American crony capitalism has been modified into Chinese crony capitalism, and the profits are being made to pay for modernization of the Chinese military. Chinese naval growth will, in time, conflict with American desires to rule the high seas, all of the high seas. Long before that happens, Chinese economic strength will come into conflict with America’s perception of its own self-interest. Even now, the Chinese currency, the Yuan, and its relationship to the dollar is the subject of heated controversy. The Yuan is tied to the dollar – “pegged” in foreign exchange parlance. The West would like to see the Yuan floated, that is, subjected to trade against other currencies as are all the rest of the first and second tier currencies in the world. China has resisted this because being pegged to the dollar has made it easy for Chinese industry to keep prices so low as to be ruinous for western competitors while still making a profit. Estimates of where the dollar-Yuan relationship would be if the Yuan were floated range from the Yuan 25% higher to 50% higher. Not surprisingly, the world does not want to see a 25% revaluation in a single step.

Stepping back from the competition with China, unquestionably the central theme for American foreign policy for the next 50 to 100 years, one has to question how various pieces fit together. North Korea is a dangerous country with led by a madman. China has, rather short-sightedly, adopted the policy of propping up the Korean government in order to avoid several millions of Korean refugees fleeing starvation by trying to move to China. The Clinton administration attempted to defuse growing danger by diplomatic moves. North Korea simply kept no part of its bargain. Now North Korea is poses a nuclear threat to our allies in the region.

Iran has posed a nasty problem for US policy makers since President Carter failed in his Presidential duty to protect US soil, even in the form of a US embassy. The Senate did no better: while Carter failed to ask for a declaration of war when Iran attacked our embassy and held hostage our people, the Senate can act on its own to declare war even absent a request from the President. Such a declaration might well have forced Carter to act, and the US might not now face both Islamic terrorism and a hostile Iran.

Having failed to timely take decisive action, Carter, and later Reagan, armed Iraq as a counter-weight against the Iranian militants. Iraq more than co-operated: it attacked Iran. That was all well and good from the perspective of US foreign policy makers. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, became so ego-maniacal that he attacked Kuwait in 1990. For his efforts, Saddam was completely defanged by the first Bush administration. Iraq was left to occupy Iran’s attention, with constant control from the skies by twice weekly bombing runs on anti-aircraft and missile sites throughout the remainder of GHW Bush’s administration and all of Clinton’s.

The question without a rational foreign policy answer is: “Why did Bush, the son, attack Iraq?” The attack used US forces needed to threaten Kim. The attack removed Iraq as a threat to Iran. With Saddam gone, Syria was able to use Iraq as a staging ground for terrorists headed for Palestine and Israel. Saddam's removal enabled Al Qaeda to use Iraq as a training and staging ground, something Saddam had not tolerated because he feared the outcome of allowing religious zealots to proselytize in Iraq. Oil production in Iraq is less than half what it was under Saddam. Even the happy faces in the Bush administration acknowledge the costs will exceed $1 trillion.

The invasion of Iraq undermined decades of US foreign policy in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. When President Johnson foolishly and stupidly embarked on the war in Viet Nam, the US military was some four times the size of today’s and retained the ability to act decisively in Eastern Europe and other theaters, had the Soviet Union been foolish enough to attack. The current action in Iraq has left the “small-but-mobile” military apple of Donald Rumsfeld’s eye without the capability of acting effectively anywhere else in the world. Committing 100% of the nation’s fighting forces in an elective war while not taking strong action to train more forces (spelled “draft”) is a risk that only an idiot or an ideologue would undertake.

When this country was founded, the smaller states were mindful of and fearful of a tyranny of the majority. The areas in which we see that reflected in the constitution include the bicameral legislature with different rules for representation. In the House of Representatives, the 484 seats are apportioned according the population (we will ignore the completely lawless way that Tom DeLay has gerrymandered Texas, for which he is under investigation in Texas). In the Senate each state has equal power. Small states like Delaware, large but unpopulated states like Wyoming and densely populated states like California and New York all have equal power in the Senate. The intent of the founders was simply to deny the possibility of tyranny by the majority.

The founders also established the Electoral College as it is in order to prevent the most populous states from overwhelming the smaller and less populous states in the presidential election. So important was the concept of maintaining the rights of the minority that both the means of representation in the legislature AND the electoral college were agreed upon BEFORE the serious discussions started on the presidency. Indeed, the name for the executive officer had not been debated nor the number (there were proposals for three executives, modeled on the old Roman Triumvirate system), much less had all the duties, powers and responsibilities been decided when the founders implemented structures intended to protect the rights of the minority.

The third way in which the founders protected the rights of the minority was by making most difficult the amending of the constitution. Two thirds of the representatives in each house plus three-quarters of the legislatures of the states must ratify. Please note well that three quarters of the legislatures of the states taken individually means that, say, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Delaware, Montana, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Idaho, Maine and Nebraska can block an amendment to the constitution. That is, 13 million people in a nation of 281 million people (2000 census figures) or 4.6%, yes, that is less than five percent, of the nation can prevent a change of the constitution.

That same reasoning led to the rule that two-thirds of the members of the Senate needed to agree to stop debate on an issue. Yes, that means that a filibuster by the minority can stop the majority from taking action. After World War II, the senate moved away from the intent of the founders and towards a tyranny of the majority by changing the rules so that only 60% of the members in agreement could pass legislation over the dead bodies of the opposition. Now, Bill Frist and the Republicans are doing everything in their power to undermine the designs of the founding fathers. The excuse Frist gives is that the rule is not enshrined in the constitution. True enough, but had the founders known that Bill Frist was going to emasculate as many protections for the minority as possible, there never would have been a United States of America. To heap shame upon Oregon as well as ignominy on the founders, Gordon Smith announced that, because the rules of the Senate were not “holy scripture,” he would vote for a tyranny of the majority.

In addition to an evident lack of morals, Senator Smith lacks historic perspective. The intent of the founders IS clear and the complete writings exist today. The complete writings of the Quran, Q’ran or Koran, the underlying text for Muslims, exist today. The complete writings of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Senator’s Mormon religious faith are in existence. What is NOT in existence is the complete writings of the Old and New Testament of the Jewish and Christian religious faith. Senators Frist, Smith and any others who joint them should be (but won’t be, because their constituents are more interested in getting their way than in protecting the collective rights of the nation) un-elected as soon as possible. Too bad for the nation that we have these small minded, religious bigots at the helm of the ship of state.

Where are the Conservatives?

The Bush administration Justice Department is suing the State of California to prohibit California from allowing prescription of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, by physicians for medical uses despite the fact that what few studies have been done show TCH to be safe and effective if used as prescribed. How does the federal government have jurisdiction? The only jurisdictional claim lies under the Interstate Commerce Clause, which allows federal jurisdiction in interstate commerce. Do you hear the clinker? Marijuana is being claimed to be “traded” in interstate commerce. The specific claim made by the DOJ is that “if marijuana is grown in California for medicinal uses, Californians won’t import marijuana from other states for their personal, albeit illegal, use.” Conservatives limit the power of federal government and conserve the values of prior generations, especially those of our founding fathers. Where are the conservatives in the Bush DOJ?

The DOJ is suing Oregon to overturn its physician assisted suicide law, “Death with Dignity.” The DOJ claim for jurisdiction here? The interstate commerce clause. Because the pharmaceuticals used are shipped from state to state, the Bush administration has decided it can dictate how those drugs are used. This is a lot like the suit against California. Where are the conservatives in the Bush administration?

Now the Bush DOJ has sued Kentucky because Kentucky has set behavioral standards for its real estate brokers that the DOJ doesn’t like. Kentucky has said that commission dollars may be paid only from one broker to another or from a client to a broker. This regulation exactly parallels Oregon’s. Kentucky has construed its law to prohibit money from being returned to the client as after sale kick-backs. What is the DOJ’s claim for jurisdiction? The interstate commerce clause. The DOJ will try to persuade a court that somehow Kentucky’s licensing standards effect interstate commerce. Where are the conservatives in the Bush administration?

The constitution clearly reserves for the states individually the right to license its own professionals. That includes the power to license lawyers, doctors, dentists, teachers, social workers, real estate agents, veterinarians and any other group the state feels it needs to license in order to promote the health, safety and welfare of its citizens. The federal government has no right to intervene unless it can show a direct, substantive impact on commerce between states. In the cases now in the court system, the DOJ has made no showing of “direct, substantive impact” that a rational, non-partisan economist or jurist would accept because none exists. Yet the DOJ is in court. Where are the conservatives in the Bush administration?

What would the founding fathers say about contraception, abortion and stem cell research? There are two ways of approaching the issue: to place today's technology into the social milieu of the time; to imagine bringing the founders into today's world. In the case of, say, nuclear weapons proliferation, the results might well be different because nuclear weapons were undreamt of. However, two of the three items on today's list were known about and considered, albeit with different technology than exists today.

Abortion has been with mankind throughout its existence of roughly 100,000 years. For the first 99,900 years there were no laws against abortion. The lies and errors of fact put forth by assorted religious groups, be they Pentecostal, Catholic, Muslim, Shinto (an unlikely choice) or "other," to the contrary notwithstanding, humans have tolerated abortion with little ado until the 20th century. There were no laws against abortion in the 18th century, and the tradition was against laws regulating sexual conduct.

The 18th century was the beginning of the age of reason. Logic, not mysticism, was the order of the day. The colonists were great admirers of ideas and were well-steeped in Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the other philosophers of the day. They were fully cognizant of the moral ramifications of their actions and considered ethical matters even more fully than today's society. Yet they did not outlaw abortion. We don't even have any evidence that suggests they considered whether to make it unlawful. All the evidence from the 18th century is that the founding fathers did not, so presumably would not, outlaw abortion.

That, by the way, demonstrates the hypocrisy of Justice Antonin Scalia. He claims he decides cases in a manner consistent with the intent of the founding fathers, while his actual decisions reflect only his world view (Weltanschauung) wrapped in a tissue of lies about what the founders would have done. His opposition to abortion is adamant and unfounded in history, though his claims are quite to the contrary.

The notion that the state has the right to ban contraceptive devices makes our founders roll over in their graves. The Jeffersonians would, without doubt, be working to establish an armed insurrection against such a totalitarian government. There is no question that each and every one of the framers would view an invasion of the bedroom by the state with complete horror. Perhaps a better question is whether the tolerance promulgated by the First Amendment would win the day, or whether the legislators who passed such a bill would be tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. That such a bill was passed in the 20th century and had to be struck down by the Supreme Court albeit on grounds less firm than those our history creates, is an atrocity created by Religio-Nazi Pentacostals.

Stem cell research was not a matter of consideration for the framers. Technology has here outstripped their imagination. The main claim of the Pentecostal sects is that the clump of a few dozen cells might become a human and therefore must be accorded all the protections of a human (this argument is also used with respect to abortion.)

Although England and France had outlawed slavery, America had slaves not only at the time of the founders, but for most of the following century. Clearly, being human didn't cause one to acquire rights in the eyes of the founders. Certainly, a clump of cells, visible only through a microscope, would not have been accorded the rights of a free, white, property owning male.

Why "free, white, property owning male?" At the time of the constitutional convention not only were black people slaves, but also there were indentured servants, who were, in effect, slaves who could work themselves into freedom. Only male property owners, meaning real estate, could vote. There was also a good bit of the British view that whatever belonged to a woman became her husband's upon her marriage. This was not universally codified as was the case in England, nor was it universally adhered to. George Washington seems to have thought that his responsibility was to care for the portion of their holdings that came with Martha, but that it was hers, not theirs.

Many of the framers, such as John Adams, were deeply religious. Others, such as Franklin and Washington, were much less so. But all were of a scientific mindset. What evidence supports the notion that stem cells have souls? None whatsoever. For that matter, who can say with certainty that fetuses have souls? In fact, 16th century theologians argued over when it was that the soul enters the body. That was an argument which passed into theological history unresolved.

Looking at the way things were, we see (a) clumps of cells are just clumps of cells: there is nothing factual, no science and no reason to imply they are more; (b) fetuses are not known to be fully human, that is, to have souls (the framers believed humans had souls); (c) no more than 25% of the population was actually allowed to vote; (d) many humans had no rights. There is nothing in these facts, no real world consideration that leads to any conclusion other than that the framers would have had no difficulty with stem cell research, abortion or contraception. Further, they would, without doubt, have opposed any and all laws to the contrary.

Looking a bit further, it seems that today's politicians, in their zeal to be power players, petty dictators, are using religion in a way that was anethema to the founders. Bill Frist and Tom DeLay would not have been tolerated by the founders for the simply reason that both are impermissibly injecting religion into government.

The media certainly is profound when it comes to distorting reality. George W. Bush and his gang are called "Conservatives." Too bad that appellation is unrelated to reality. GWB et al. are a cross between theocrats and tyrants.

But today's question is "What is a conservative." A conservative is simply one who prefers to conserve what s/he has. Politically, a conservative is a person who prefers the status quo as contrasted with a person who advocates change. An interesting sidebar is that "Conservationists" are a variety of "conservative," both in the word itself (to conserve) and within the meaning of conservative.

On an applied basis, a conservative (or, at least, an intelligent conservative) recognizes that change is inevitable. Rather than refusing to change or sticking his head into the sand and decreeing that there will be no change, an intelligent conservative chooses to have change come slowly. The hoped for goal is to take changes in small steps that each of which can be undone should it prove unwise.

A liberal, by definition, advocates change. An intelligent liberal and an intelligent conservative are not, or should not be, far apart. Wholesale change for its own sake is expensive and unproductive. So prudent people don't undertake wholesale change, be they liberals or conservatives (intelligent here implied).

On the US Supreme Court an intelligent conservative is called a "Constitutional Conservative." Such a Justice is slow to reinterpret the constitution, and would prefer to avoid overturning precedent. At the moment the US is blessed with only one such person: Justice John Paul Stevens. Truly ironic is that he was appointed by a man who wanted to be dictator: Richard M. Nixon. Mr. Justice Stevens was the only Justice who allowed himself to be influenced by the constitution in the case surrounding the 2000 Gore-Bush election. Eight Justices voted to hear the case, Stevens against. Yet the constitution clearly states that electoral matters of the sort encountered in Florida are exclusively the purview of the states; the federal government has no jurisdiction. Thus eight members of the current court are "Judicial Activists," judges who want to legislate from the bench rather than restrict themselves to their proper role: interpreting the law in light of the constitution.

In the judicial arena, the press routinely lies to the public. It calls Rhenquist, Scalia andThomas "Conservative." They are not. They are politically active and advocate overturning large numbers of long-standing decisions. That, it would seem, makes them liberal, albeit liberal judges seeking a rather totalitarian government.

Next week we will look at contraception, abortion and stem cell research through the lens of the constitution and the intent of the founding fathers.